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Comtrade Software, which makes monitoring and data protection solutions for hyperconverged infrastructures, has hooked up with ExaGrid, a provider of hyper-converged secondary storage for backup, in a new partnership to offer a backup-application-to-backup-storage solution for Nutanix.
Early last year, Comtrade launched its HYCU platform, which is purpose-built data storage protection for Nutanix servers. In recent months, Comtrade has added support for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server and combined it with disaster recovery and backup for Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) environments.
The partnership of Comtrade HYCU and the ExaGrid, announced Feb. 6, enables a scalable disk-based backup appliance to provide an alternative end-to-end data protection solution for data centers running Nutanix. And a lot more data centers are running Nutanix in the last 12 to 18 months; see market stats below.
HYCU Makes Applications Transparent to Infrastructure Teams
HYCU auto-detects applications running in virtual machines (VMs) and makes them transparent to the infrastructure teams. With this new level of visibility, HYCU ensures that no critical applications are left unprotected–a key challenge for enterprises embracing cloud and HCI architectures in their modern data centers. Since HYCU creates application-specific recovery workflows, IT administrators can easily back up applications and recover data in minutes, Comtrade said.
ExaGrid complements HYCU with its approach to backup storage that includes a unique landing zone to deliver the fastest backups and avoids data rehydration to deliver the fastest restores and VM boots. ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture ensures a fixed-length backup window as data grows, and various size appliance models allow customers to buy what they need as they need it, avoiding disruptive and costly forklift upgrades.
Customers are able to mix older and newer appliances in the same scale-out system, eliminating product obsolescence and protecting their IT investment up front and over time.
The combined solution offers key benefits that include:
- one-click application-aware backup with dynamic application discovery;
- scale-out backup storage expands up to a 2PB full backup while delivering consistent performance;
- deployment as straightforward as the Nutanix infrastructure; and
- simple setup and incremental forever backup efficiency.
HCI: Hottest Converged Systems Segment
Hyperconverged systems are the hottest-selling converged systems segment in the world right now.
According to market analyst IDC, Dell EMC is No. 1 in hyperconverged infrastructure sales at 29 percent. Nutanix, a much smaller company, is already No. 2 with 21 percent of revenue share.
Meanwhile, total HCI sales grew 48.5 percent, year-over-year during 2017, generating $763.4 million worth of sales.
Dell EMC’s revenue from HCI is about $221 million, with Nutanix’s about $160 million.
Hyperconverged systems combine core storage and compute functionality into a single, highly virtualized platform. A key characteristic of HCI systems that differentiate these products from other integrated systems is their scale-out architecture and their ability to provide all compute and storage functions through commodity hardware.